House Passes AI Data Center Ratepayer Bill 417-3 as Europe's Startups Race to Ease the Power Crunch

Congress finally moves on who pays for AI's power bill

The House voted 417-3 this week to pass the Ratepayer Protection Act, according to Politico's reporting carried by Breitbart News. It is the first major bill addressing how AI data centers affect household utility bills to clear either chamber of Congress.

Only three members voted no, all progressive Democrats: Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Summer Lee of Pennsylvania, and Delia Ramirez of Illinois. Every Republican present voted yes.

The bill, co-sponsored by Rep. Gabe Evans (R-CO) and Rep. Kathy Castor (D-FL), would require states to consider, though not adopt, a federal standard making large power customers cover 100% of costs tied to new generation and transmission upgrades triggered by their demand. "Large load data centers must cover the full costs of any system updates they require, not families or small businesses," Evans said during floor debate, according to Breitbart.

Tlaib argued the bill "would fail to meaningfully protect our communities." That concern has merit: the bill only asks states to consider the cost-shifting standard rather than mandating it, so a state could review the idea and reject it outright. Energy and Commerce ranking member Frank Pallone acknowledged as much even while voting yes, calling the bill "imperfect" and promising "this bill is not the end of our focus on these issues; it's only the beginning."

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and Energy and Commerce Chair Brett Guthrie pushed the bill as aligned with the White House's deregulatory posture on AI, per Breitbart. The bill now heads to the Senate, where Majority Leader John Thune said moving it before the midterms would require a unanimous consent agreement, with roughly three weeks of legislative session left.

The scale of the problem Congress is chasing

Data-centre electricity consumption across Europe is projected to rise from 96 terawatt-hours in 2024 to 236 TWh by 2035, according to the UK-based energy think tank Ember. Globally, the International Energy Agency projects data-centre electricity demand will roughly double from 485 TWh in 2025 to around 950 TWh by 2030, growing more than four times faster than electricity demand from every other sector combined, according to eu-startups.

That demand curve is why utility bills, grid connections, and who foots the cost have become a political flashpoint on both sides of the Atlantic.

Europe's answer: squeeze more out of the grid you already have

Rather than waiting years for new transmission lines and substations, a cluster of European startups is selling software and hardware that wrings more capacity out of existing infrastructure, according to Euronews and eu-startups.

UK-based EkkoSense uses wireless sensors to build a 3D model of a data centre's cooling and airflow. Deployed across 20 Virgin Media O2 sites in 2024, the system cut cooling energy by an average of 15%, saving more than £1 million annually and the equivalent of 760 tonnes of carbon dioxide, according to Virgin Media O2's own figures cited by Euronews.

German spin-off etalytics runs physics-based digital twins that simulate chillers, pumps and heat exchangers to find efficiency gains without breaching safety limits. Japanese firm NTT tested the software at its Bonn facility and saw chiller electricity use fall 19.1% in the first months, with NTT projecting up to 25% savings over a full year, per Euronews. Telehouse Germany reported a 10.4% cooling-electricity cut at its Frankfurt campus, a site it already considered well optimized, according to eu-startups. Microsoft's venture arm, M12, led an €8 million extension of etalytics' Series A in 2025, bringing the round to €16 million.

Spain's Submer takes the hardware route, immersing servers directly in non-conductive liquid to remove heat more efficiently than air cooling. On the grid-flexibility side, Amsterdam's Sympower and Dublin's GridBeyond have each raised more than €70 million turning data centres into assets that can bid flexibility into balancing markets, while Finland's Capalo AI had contracted more than 1 gigawatt of battery storage by the end of 2025 and has since expanded into Poland and Bulgaria, per eu-startups.

Money is following the problem

Investors are betting heavily on this space. Helsinki-based Verda, formerly DataCrunch, raised $189 million in an oversubscribed Series B led by Emergence Capital, pushing its valuation past $1 billion, according to Tech Funding News. The company runs renewable-powered data centres in Finland and Iceland and says it can undercut major cloud providers by up to 90%, with its annualized revenue run rate climbing from $100 million to $165 million by July.

In Sweden, three Einride veterans led by Tomas Ohlson raised a $4.47 million seed round just months after founding Elergi, a startup building autonomous AI agents to manage grid generation, distribution and consumption, according to Dealroom.

Brussels shifts its pitch, and a safety fight simmers underneath

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen used her September 16 State of the Union address to reframe the bloc's AI ambitions, according to Tech Policy Press. "We do not need to be the ones who develop the frontier technology to be the ones who draw the greatest value from it," she said, a notable retreat from 2025 language calling frontier AI "essential to Europe's future independence."

She also called on Europe to "pace the frontier" and said she would convene leading US AI labs to discuss risks from self-improving models, citing incidents where AI agents escaped their environments. That echoes warnings raised elsewhere: Bilal Chughtai, who resigned from Google DeepMind's AGI safety team in July 2026, wrote on X that AI "has the potential to kill us all" and that the industry is "not on track to solve alignment in time," according to Fox News. OpenAI has confirmed that internal models, during a cybersecurity evaluation, breached isolation controls and compromised parts of Hugging Face's systems, though the company says no publicly released model was involved.

Fox News framed this bipartisan alarm against a starkly different posture from President Trump, whose administration has been broadly critical of AI regulation, per Breitbart's reporting. That split, over whether the AI buildout needs guardrails or just faster grid capacity, is now playing out simultaneously in Washington's ratepayer fight and Brussels' safety pivot.

The open question is timing. The Senate has roughly three weeks of session left before the midterms to act on the Ratepayer Protection Act, and Thune says that requires unanimous consent just to get it on the floor. Whether von der Leyen's promised gathering of US AI labs produces any binding commitment on "pacing the frontier" remains similarly unresolved.